One constant of my growing-up years was my family’s afternoon “quiet time.” My siblings and I would each be given a separate space in which to play – our room, usually, or a designated spot in the house – and we would amuse ourselves quietly for an hour or two.
I loved the days when I got to spend quiet time in the “Africa room” (a basement room so named because it held various souvenirs from our time overseas). I’d amuse myself with the decorative wooden zebra and elephant, fantasizing that I belonged to an impoverished family in Africa.
At the time, I was enamored with the idea of having a monsoon – what I believed amounted to a season-long flood. Of course, my house was constantly flooding, and I’d have to climb on the foot-wide ledge that lined two walls of the Africa room. Then, I’d scatter decorative filler pebbles across the room’s floor and go diving. In my imaginary African economy, the shiny pebbles were precious, and my family could sell them for money so that they could buy the week’s food.
When I spent “quiet time” in my room or the playroom of my family’s basement, I’d come up with other amusements or games. In my room, I’d line up my dolls against the wall, giving them each an old volume of “McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader” to study, as I cooked them meals or changed the littlest one’s clothes. In the playroom, I’d construct little shops or dormitories out of Lego’s, assigning each of my Lego people to a particular activity or task.
My point in all this? I didn’t need to be constantly entertained. As a child, I had the natural capacity both to play by myself, when necessary, and to play with whatever happened to be on hand.
And that capacity isn’t abnormal! Kyrie, a mother of three young children and the creator of Transformed Homemakers Society, makes a similar point in her online video, “What Old Fashioned Moms Understood About Parenting That We Forgot.” There, she comments that kids need quite little to be entertained. In her words,
When you fire yourself from that role of cruise director for your children, you start to notice just how little your children actually need to feel content. So many of the things that we thought they needed suddenly start to look completely irrelevant.
Kyrie points out, too, that the pressure for parents to constantly entertain their children is, historically, quite novel. Parents in the 1800s, as far as we know, weren’t rushing to find sensory activities for their children. Nor did they seem overwhelmed by the task of discovering new excitements for their children’s free time. Instead, they led their children in the natural work of the home, or they allowed their children to find entertainment for themselves.
This kind of approach to entertaining children lessens the parental load, certainly, but I’m convinced that it also serves the children themselves. The time I spent amusing myself as a child helped to grow my creativity and deepen my capacity to think of ways to entertain myself apart from external stimulation. I learned to play with any objects at hand, and, when “quiet time” or other unstructured time began to feel too long, I would either learn to come up with a new way to spend my time or learn to handle the boredom.
Now, it wasn’t as if all my childhood was unstructured and I was tasked with filling every spare moment of my time. I had school to do, of course, and my mom did an amazing job of planning activities or projects for my brothers and me. But the external responsibilities and treats weren’t constant, nor did they need to be. Indeed, it’s more than possible that society’s current emphasis on “sensory activities” or planning constant entertainment for children is only serving to inhibit their creativity and overwhelm their parents.
So, if you’re a mom, dad, or otherwise taking care of kids, be encouraged! Entertaining your kids doesn’t need to be an adult’s constant responsibility. In fact, looking back at my childhood, I’m glad that it wasn’t.
Aletheia Hitz is an editor/writer by vocation, philosopher by training, and poet at heart. She’s currently working toward her Master's in theology, and she aspires to spend her life in pursuit of the infinite beauty of God.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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